I’m dead. He laughs, leaning back in his chair, in front of me, hands crossed behind his head, eyes closed, dead. And four short words burst out of his mouth: I want a life. I observe him. Nearly thirty. Perhaps he’s tormented by the idea of his youth rushing past him, wearing him down; perhaps he feels he is sacrificing himself to cooking, just as high-level athletes sacrifice themselves to sports—and we will never see it from close enough, that abstinence, that discipline, that suffering, the control of the body and the emotions that animate it, the mental life simmering carefully like milk over a fire, never boiling or spilling over, this order that is imposed on them and that they impose on themselves at twenty years old, this dark heroism straining toward glory. It couldn’t go on like that forever, La Belle Saison. A gnawing logic, the logic of economics, the logic of business, demands, implacably, that you must grow if you do not want to perish; this logic insinuates itself into his life, like a current of cold air at the bottom of the ocean, before finally shattering when it collides with his youth. Recently—but was this because he was tired?—he’d felt that he was struggling to keep reinventing the dishes, varying the compositions using the same piece of meat without altering his methods, and suffering ever more from the restrictions of space—a general sensation of compression, obstacles, endless repetition. So he dropped out of the race; he folded. In doing this, he exploded the structure of time that bound up his existence.

10

Asia

POT-AU-FEU, BROTHS

Two months later, Bangkok is gray, lukewarm, frenetic. Mauro is working in a fashionable Italian restaurant where one of his friends, a chef, called him about a vacant position. Mauro decided he wanted to take off after the closure of La Belle Saison, and he thought that Thailand would be a potential entry point into the discovery of Asian cuisine. The sale of the restaurant brought in 270,000 euros, a capital gain that consoles him a little for the months spent without paying himself a salary; he has a little time to figure things out. For now, he is not working with any local products: access to international cuisine is one of the essential markers of the rich business class that thrives here. And that’s the milieu in which he’s operating.